Video: Introducing Bevel and Emboss

In this movie, I'll introduce you to what is by far the most elaborate and complicated of the layer effects inside Photoshop, and that's Bevel and Emboss. And I use the Bevel and Emboss effect to create this kind of lid that's resting behind the letters. But I think it's best understood in the context of creating a frame. So I'm going to switch to this image. And I'm going to click on this Frame layer to select it. And then I'll press the A key to get my Black Arrow tool. And I'll click on the rectangle, in my case I have to click on it a couple of times in order to select it.

Photoshop CC One-on-One is back, and this installment teaches you how to build on your basic knowledge and achieve next-level effects with this premiere image-editing program. Industry pro Deke McClelland shows you how to seamlessly move and patch areas of a photo with the Content-Aware toolset; stretch the brightness of a scene with automatic and custom Levels adjustments; create intricate designs with text and shapes; and morph an image with layer effects and transformations. Deke also shares his techniques for sharpening details, whether addressing noise and highlight/shadow clipping or camera shake, and converting a full-color image to black and white. The final chapters show you how to best print and save images for the web, making sure all your hard work pays off in the final output.

Topics include:

Performing automatic retouch, scaling, and more with the Content-Aware tools

Introducing Bevel and Emboss

In this movie, I'll introduce you to what is by far the mostelaborate and complicated of the layer effectsinside Photoshop, and that's Bevel and Emboss.And I use the Bevel and Emboss effect tocreate this kind of lid that's resting behind the letters.But I think it's best understood in the context of creating a frame.So I'm going to switch to this image.And I'm going to click on this Frame layer to select it.And then I'll press the A keyto get my Black Arrow tool.And I'll click on the rectangle, in my case I have toclick on it a couple of times in order to select it.

Now, I want to turn the rectangle into a hole.So we're filling the area outside the rectanglewhich will serve as the frame that we're lining.And so I'll go up to the Path operationsicon, click on it and then choose Subtract Front Shape.And that will turn that shape into a hole.I could've alsojust tapped the minus key by the way.All right, now I'll click on the filled area to deselect the rectangle,and I'll press Ctrl+H or Cmd+H on the Mac to hide the outline.And now I'll go to the Blend Mode popupmenu, on the upper left corner of the Layers panel.

And change it from Normal to the first of the contrast modes, which is Overlay.And that'll give us a little bit of heat inside of that frame.And next, I'll press the Esc key so the blendmode is no longer active here on the PC. That's not necessary on a Mac.And I'll press Shift+5 in order to reduce the fill opacity to 50%.Now that makes the layer nearly invisible.However, it's going to serve as a perfect jumping off point for Bevel and Emboss.So drop down to the FX icon and choose the Beveland Emboss command which is at the top of the stack.

And just so we can see what we're doing here, I'm going to move this dialogbox quite a bit over.And I'm going to increase the size value to 60 pixels, let's say.And I'm going to reduce the altitutde value.We'll come back to what this means in a moment.To 30 degrees.And I'm going to increase the depth value to let's say 300%.And depth by the way controls the steepness of the edges.So at this point, we've got an angle value of 135 degrees.That means the light source is up and to the left.

And as a result, it's casting shadows in the upperleft corner, because after all this edge is sloping downward.And then this edge is sloping downward as well.The entire interior of the frame is.And as a result, the lower right corner, is catching the light.Now I'm going to adjust my highlights and shadows.Which in fact of course the shadowsand highlights that we're seeing inside the image.I'm going to start with the Shadow mode.I want to give it just a little bit of color.So I'm going to click on that black swatch.I'm going to change the Hue value to the usual 35 degrees.And I'll set both saturation and brightness to 15%.

So this time, I'm going with a very low saturation dark color.And I'm going to leave the opacity set to 75%, but I do want to amp up the effect.So I'm going to switch the blend mode from Multiply tothe most radical of the darkening modes, which is Linear Burn.Then, I'm going to do something similar with the highlight.I'll click on the white color swatch here, I'll change the hue value to 35 degrees.I'll change the saturation to 35% and I'll leavethe brightness set to 100%, then I'll click OK.And I'm going to change the blend mode from Screen, tothe most radical of the brightening modes, which is Linear Dodge.

And we end up with this hot effect down here.Now, let's take a look at Style.And I knowI'm kind of jumping around here, but Iwant to work in an order that makes some sense.By default, the shadows and highlights are set on the inside of the frame.However, if you wanted to move them outsidethe frame, to the interior of that unfilled rectangle.Then you would choose outer bevel.And notice now, we're casting thehighlights and shadows into the background image.If you want to kind of split the difference, you can choose Emboss.

And that's going to go ahead and centerthe shadows and highlights on that frame boundary.If you want to create a kind of carved effect where the frame goesin and then the interior comes back out, then you go with pillow emboss.And you can see now we've got a shadow immediately followedby a highlight and another shadow followed by a highlight down right.And as a result it appears as ifthe rectangle's kind of carved into the background.This final options Stroke Emboss requires a stroke,so we have to turn on the Stroke.

Make it pretty thick and then that could set the Emboss effect inside of it.However for this effect what we want is Innerbevel, so I'll go ahead and switch it back.By default, this technique option is set toSmooth, meaning that we have soft highlights and shadows.If you want something a little more emphatic,then you can switch to one of thechisel options here.We're not going to see a difference between them, because inorder to see a difference between Chisel hard and Chisel soft.You need a curving edge, and in our case we've got straight sides.

But my recommendation is, either go with Smoothor go all the way, and select Chisel Hard.And notice that does give us some very abrupt transitions aswell as these kind of triangle patterns here in the corners.If you want to soften things up,you've got this Soften option right there. So go ahead and click inside that value.And notice, I'll press the Up Arrow key a few times,and as I do, you can see these triangles blur away.And I finally for what it's worth, arrived at a soften value of 10 pixels.

Now let's check out Altitude. You know how Angle works?That's the direction of the light source.Altitude is the height of, let's imagine, the sunin the sky.You can change it by dragging this guy inward in order to raisethe sun or outward in order to send it down to the horizon.And you can also drag this guy around in order to change the angle as well.I'm going to go ahead and reset that angle value to 135 degrees and now I'vegot a very low sun as you can see here, five degrees in the sky.

And that means that we have a very dark shadow indeed,because it isn't catching much light.And we have a pretty bright highlightdown right because it's really catching the light.Now if I were to click in this value, and press Shift+Up arrowin order to raise the sun let's say, as high as 45 degrees here.At this point it's about something like 10:30 A.M.And the sun's starting to rise pretty high in the sky,and as a result, we're starting to lose some of the lighton the bright edge.And we'll start filling in the dark edge shortly.

So, I'm going to take this value to 50 degrees which is thedefault setting and you can see we're starting to lose that bright edge.And now I'll press the Up arrow key, because it'sbetween 50 and 60 degrees that you really see things changing.And notice we're losing the light like crazy on the down rightedge, and we're breathing some light into the upper left edge as well.And alot of the reason that we're losing so much lightdown right is because we have such a high depth setting.If I were to take that setting down, so I'm pressing Shift+Down arrow.

To reduce this value to about 150 percent works well for this effect.Then you can see that that less steep edge is catching more light.Anyway, you can take the altitude value all the way up to90 degrees at which point it's high noon, light's coming straight down.It's going to brighten the heck out of the surface of this layer if we could see it.And we have nothing but shadows left because there'snothing really expect for the surface catching the light.Anyway, I went ahead and stuck with the default altitude of 50%.

And one more item that I haven't mentioned is Direction.Notice that right now, the surface is up, and the edges are going down.If you want it to be the other way around, you want the surface of theframe to be treated as if it's down and then the edges are going up.Then you switch to the Down option.I, of course want Up to remain selected,and then finally, I took the size value down.I just wanted it this high for demonstrational purposes.I ended up taking the size value down to 10 pixels.To create this slightly sloping frame effect that you see here.

And now I'll move the dialog box over andclick the OK button in order to accept that effect.And that folks, is how you create a raisedframing effect using Bevel and Emboss here inside Photoshop.

A: Deke updated the course to reflect changes in the 2014
version of Photoshop CC. The updates are concentrated in "The Content-Aware Collection" and "Creating and Formatting Text"
chapters, but there are new movies sprinkled throughout the course as well.

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